Comments on: Dev Diligence: Don’t Invest in the Wrong Code

By: Chad Austin » Blog Archive » A Wiki For Reviewing Third-Party Libraries

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 22:35:05 +0000

[...] Wiki For Reviewing Third-Party Libraries In Don’t Invest in the Wrong Code, Tom Kleinpeter has created a wiki for pitfalls in third-party libraries. Sort of a consumer [...]

By: Inigo

Inigo — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 08:26:59 +0000

Great idea – I’d like to see this do well.

If you’d like to have this work well with many libraries of various types from multiple languages, I suggest you consider migrating the content to Semantic Mediawiki – http://semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki. SMW allows you to easily add metadata annotations to pages – for example, to identify the language of a library, or when it was last updated, or its licence, or cost – and then automatically provide contents pages and search pages for that metadata. For example, see the list of upcoming events on http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Upcoming_events.

By: Chad Austin

Chad Austin — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:46:51 +0000

I love the idea of a wiki where you can discuss libraries. Sort of like a developer’s consumer reports. We use lots of open source bits of code (with varying degrees of success) at IMVU, and this kind of thing would have helped us a lot.

You should do what you can to help it reach a critical mass.

By: Tom

Tom — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:09:39 +0000

Mayson, I was thinking about that. I haven't been listening to the stack overflow podcasts, but my hunch is that DD is focused on a more narrow question: "will I get burnt if I use this existing chunk of code". This is a particular problem that has been bothering me for a while. I actually left a comment about it a few posts ago, and then promptly forgot about the idea. Sometime last week I wondered why I just didn't go ahead and put together a wiki and see what happens.

By: Mayson Lancaster

Mayson Lancaster — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 01:55:56 +0000

Tom – you and the stackoverflow.com guys out to get together: you look like you’re headed in very similar directions.

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 23:08:48 +0000

Thanks, Joshua. I haven’t seen that one before.

By: Joshua Haberman

Joshua Haberman — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 22:43:11 +0000

Added a note to the wiki about how Kazlib (http://users.footprints.net/~kaz/kazlib.html) is the most beautifully small, flexible, no-nonsense, well-documented, gets-out-of-your-way library for doing red-black trees and hash tables. A real gem.